What your club management system can’t tell you …

Nowadays almost every club has a club management system, and it can track every transaction and usage every member does in the club. It even come with quite a few canned reports that show you data at pretty detail level. What other software could I possibility need to manage my club?

Well, a club management system usually is more about day-to-day operation, it is not that strong in strategic areas. For instance, it is not easy to get your club management system to answer questions like these:

• What areas am I doing well and what areas need to be improved?
• What new services I can offer to attract more young members?
• What are the different member usage patterns between young and older members or male and female members?
• What can I do to reduce member turnover?

To make things even more challenging, these questions keep changing because the focus of the club changes or club need to react to new challenges quickly. Pre-built canned reports just won’t cut it. It takes too long to built a new one and you usually need someone with specific technical skills to do it.

Wouldn’t it be great if all the data can be put in one place and non-tech executives can build reports/charts on the fly to analyze the data themselves? Today’s Business Intelligence tools can do exactly that. Usually a technical consultant can help putting all the data (revenue, member demography, sales, club usage, etc) into one data model, and executives can freely explore all the data and build analysis to answer any questions and discover opportunities.

Wait, there’s more good news. With the recent progress in cloud technology, if you host the dashboard in the cloud, the software cost for owning such a dashboard solution could be lower than your home’s cable subscription. Maybe it is finally time for clubs to make good use of their own data?